Business intelligence (BI) involves the collecting, maintaining, and organizing of information for an enterprise, such as for a company. An enterprise produces vast amounts of information, and uses a BI system to analyze the data, produce documents using the data, and so on. For example, a typical BI system may communicate with a data store of BI data in order to generate documents using BI data, such as charts, graphs, and so on.
The document could be a BI document, a report, a dashboard, and so on. The term report may refer to a document including information automatically retrieved (i.e., in response to computer executable instructions) from a data source (e.g., a database, a data warehouse, semi-structured file, and so on), where the information is structured in accordance with a report schema, or specification, that specifies the form in which the information should be aggregated, filtered, presented, and so on. A dashboard is similar to as report, and often is a single page, showing a graphical presentation of current and past values of key measures of an enterprise, among other things.